


Know Your Master

by dreamsofghostsandstars



Category: Penny Dreadful (TV)
Genre: Ancient Egyptian Deities, Character Study, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-31
Updated: 2016-08-31
Packaged: 2018-08-12 05:30:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7922338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreamsofghostsandstars/pseuds/dreamsofghostsandstars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vanessa Ives comes to terms with her true nature. Disclaimer: I do not own <em>Penny Dreadful</em> or anything original to it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Know Your Master

**Author's Note:**

> This was, I believe, the second fanfic I ever posted anywhere, and I wrote it before season 3 had aired. It looks a little rough to me now, and my HCs have been jossed to Hell and back, but I'm fond of it, regardless.
> 
> Quite a bit of research went into this one. Building on one of Vanessa's line from "Séance" ("Amunet, girl? No, much older"), I looked into which Egyptian/Middle Eastern deities might have been considered older than Amunet. I settled on making Vanessa the reincarnation of a goddess who had inspired both the Egyptian Naunet and the Biblical Asherah. I took a lot of license with the historical narratives of Naunet and Asherah to get their prototype into 1890s London, but, well, it's _Penny Dreadful_. I was as accurate as I could be.

_“Amunet, girl? No, much older.”_

 

 **She** had known she would open the book eventually, had known it since she told Malcolm she was leaving. Hadn’t she admitted as much, when she told Victor she was going to find “a better weapon”? No matter how much she might have told herself that she could find any number of better weapons, that God would lead her to the right one, that she would pray and pray until he sent it, she knew which weapon flashed like Excalibur’s steel in her mind, the one that would cut through her enemies. She had felt its power years ago, as soon as she had passed the sacred stones.

It drew her to it, both the part of her that was used to living as Vanessa and the part that remembered being… someone else. The part that clung to a human life and the Catholic religion could claim human motivations: Grief, hatred, revenge. Vanessa knew that her own beliefs held these reasons as immoral, but they were human. They were not the needs of a demon. And they were even true, or at least truly felt.

Her fingertip tingled, a shudder of ice through delicate capillaries, when she touched the book’s spine. Cold and calculating amid the scorching rage of an outraged woman— for whatever else she was, that was who she was, by any name— was her curiosity, her need to know her nature, her conviction that in this experience lay an answer. Something else, something else, but not something as simple as what the children— why would she call the devil that, “the children”?— sought, not Amunet.

She opened the book and began to chant in a language that was her own, in a language that had become hers not when the Cut-wife taught it to her, but when something else had entered her with its knowledge and its power. Such power, her power. She could feel it inside her, not a cold thing now, but warm. The Verbis Diablo, the word of the devil, the word of evil, the word of her own power. Her blood was like a dragon taking shape, sliding, coiling through her veins, beating its pent wings into her skin and suffusing it with the serpent’s scarlet; and in her heart throbbed great wings and tail and a heart of fire, yearning to fly above her, to fly beyond, to kill her enemies, to win her battles, to become what Vanessa Ives had never let it be.

Lord Geoffrey was nothing, but the freedom was everything. She let her power free, felt the wings jerking her body in a stiff rhythm, felt the dragon’s fiery heart explode as the dogs tore him limb from limb. She felt his agony, and savored it as though her dragon’s teeth were the ones that savaged him and his blood wet her own forked tongue.

And she knew, each shudder of her body bringing more memories and more certainty, who she was, beyond Vanessa Ives, although there was in truth no difference. There was the part of her she had accepted, and the part she had not. Naunet, came the word, a word worshippers had not used in millenia; and Asherah, the Queen of Heaven that the Israelites had known no longer lived there; and a hundred names in languages no longer spoken on Earth. Amun-Ra, both of his pieces, had mistaken her for their sister, their “mother of evil,” but she was a different mother, though she could do evil. She was the mother of mothers, and the mother of Satan. She loved her children too much to abandon them, and Nun, her spouse, too much to kill him, so she had abandoned Heaven, preferring her loneliness to either side. She could not destroy those that she loved.

And yet, the day would come when she would have to. She lay collapsed by the accursed book, filled with the satiation of victory and the bitterness of her defeat. Vanessa Ives, Naunet, she had been violated by the darkness of her children, all of whom had sensed in her some spark of themselves and a power that they craved. They had flown back to their primordial womb and filled her mind with their evil chants. She had thought that she could not live so, forever violated, and, indeed, they would never violate her again, for she had done so herself for all time. The space that they had filled was now occupied with the power she had put there.

In all this time, she had never, as herself, as Naunet, surrendered to the darkest spells that her children had devised. She had not even remembered all of them, once the children were purged from her mind. They were not spells fit for the consort of Nun, and would have no place in his Heaven; but she would not rejoin him in his cruelty, nor would she willingly allow the children to take his place and do worse than he had. Her scruples had driven her to this evil: Separated from the Heaven where she belonged, the spells of her fallen children were the greatest power she had to use against them.

And against her husband. No wonder she, as Vanessa, had loved God so much. In that other lifetime, in Heaven, she had been his queen, his lover, his sister, his spouse. They had lived with him and loved him when there was nothing, and together they had made everything. She could have perhaps killed him and taken Heaven from him, but, for all her ferocity, she had preferred to walk the lower realms with her children and her grandchildren and the great-grandchildren that were the humans.

 **Now** she knew, and she had finished forgetting. She would not surrender to make peace with her children. She would not yield to be reunited with her husband. Their millennia of quarrels and atrocities were at and end; but who was to say her reign would be better? She knew only that it would not be theirs.

For all that she loved them, she felt again a thrill, a coldness and heat, when she looked into the eyes of the childishly-built effigy and saw her future as the conqueror of them all. She was again a goddess. She was herself and she was power.

She tightened her grip on the effigy, pathetic against her own strength. She knew that below the luster of these tears lay the greater sparkle of triumph. Vanessa Ives spoke then to all the gods who opposed her:

“Beloved, know your master.”


End file.
